DUring his busy season, Roberto Bolanos works at least 10 hours a day. Sometimes, he’ll spend as many as 16 hours in the office.
Bolanos, a senior audit manager at the accounting firm Weiser LLP, knows stress and late nights can wreak havoc on his eating habits. But at a health seminar Weiser offered last fall, he picked up some helpful tips – learning, for example, that a spoonful of peanut butter can provide a quick energy boost.
“It opened my mind to the things you need to do to be healthy,” he says.
Across the city and beyond, a growing number of companies are trying to similarly open their employees’
minds and otherwise encourage them to eat better, lose weight, exercise, tend to dormant medical issues – in short, to be healthier. In recent years “wellness” has become quite the corporate buzzword: The magazine publisher Meredith Corporation is one of a rising number of firms with a “wellness manager UPS employees can volunteer to be “wellness champions” and inform colleagues of company resources; Scholastic has an on-site “wellness center” in its SoHo offices.
Other increasingly common initiatives include smoking-cessation and weight-loss programs, on-site gyms and exercise classes, and health screenings in which employees fill out questionnaires about their lifestyles and take blood tests to determine risk factors. More than two-thirds of companies now offer such programs, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).
“At first it was just something a few large workplaces were doing,” says Marilyn Helms, a professor of management at Dalton State College in Georgia who’s studied corporate health programs. “Now, with rising healthcare costs, the tide’s kind of turning.”
As Helms’ words suggest, there are financial reasons for all this get-well gusto. Having healthier workers cuts down on health-care costs, as well as reducing sick days and medical leaves.
But the rationale goes beyond cutting costs. There’s growing appreciation for the notion that healthier employees are happier employees – and more productive ones.
“People do a better job when they feel good about themselves,” says Deborah Musso, director of Sea Change New York, a wellness company that works with firms around the city. “This is what companies are getting to understand.”
Tim O’Neil, the Meredith wellness manager, sees creating a healthier workplace as part of building a better business culture.
“Anytime the company can help an employee feel better, enhance their level of energy and help create a fun atmosphere at work, it’s mutually beneficial,” he says.
paying dividends
Given the tendency of people chained to their desks all day to eat too much and move too little, diet and exercise are big targets. On-site Weight Watchers meetings have grown in popularity in the past few years, says corporate sales manager Janet Thornton.
“The group support is a key motivator for people,” she says. “The workplace is such a great environment for that.”
At Liz Claiborne, employees from associates to senior vice presidents come together for meetings.
“Titles are left at the door,” says Pamela Schafer, a senior executive who attends. “It’s a sort of an even, nonjudgmental playing field with a common goal.”
A busy working mom, Schafer says she wouldn’t participate if the program wasn’t conveniently located at work. “There’s no excuse,” she says. “You can just swing by.”
Some employers are offering another incentive besides convenience: cash, vacation days or prizes. The Boston-based Tangerine Wellness has built a booming business setting up incentive-based plans that reward employees for shedding pounds or maintaining a healthy weight. At some companies, colleagues team up to compete in weight-loss contests, and the winners split a cash award or donate it to charity.
Tangerine CEO Aaron Day compares the incentives to stock options. “People are used to rewards for measured results,” he says.
Events like contests figure into other initiatives. At XMPie, a division of Xerox, 22 staffers teamed up for the Eat Well Live Well Challenge, which required colleagues to walk 10,000 steps and eat five cups of fruits or vegetables each day.
In addition to fostering healthier habits, the contest – which required workers to wear pedometers around the office to log their movement – was “a great morale booster,” says marketing director Kimberly Meyers.
In addition to exercise and eating programs, some employers are also redoubling their efforts to assist their workers in need. UPS, for example, matches employees with coaches who counsel them on a wide spectrum of health issues. It came in handy for Myrtha Suralie, a business development supervisor, when she was recently hospitalized for pregnancy-related complications. The day after she was admitted, Suralie received a phone call from a nurse in Virginia who said she’d be available to answer any questions. For the rest of her pregnancy, Suralie spoke to her coach frequently, for as long as two hours at a time.
“She’d educate me on a lot of things that doctors quickly tell you about and just walk away,” says Suralie, who gave birth to a healthy boy – and still speaks to her coach.
In addition to health coaches, the SoHo-based publisher Scholastic has an on-site wellness center staffed by a doctor and nurse practitioner – a perk 13 percent of companies offer, according to SHRM.
Since it opened last year, most employees have visited the center, often for mild concerns such as eye irritations. Which is the point – to address such ailments before they become problems.
The center has handled more serious problems as well. When internal communications director Russell Thomas stopped in last year after feeling short of breath, he ended up being whisked by ambulance to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with pneumonia.
“If I hadn’t been able to see a doctor until Saturday, that may very well have been too late,” he says. “It’s not an overstatement to say the wellness center saved my life.”
a private matter?
While employees and companies alike embrace many wellness programs, they do bring up issues of privacy. After all, some workers might not be too keen on the idea of their bosses knowing their cholesterol levels, or taking an interest in the size of their waistline.
“The downside is when employees don’t want to cooperate the way employers would like,” says employment lawyer John Robinson, adding that “it’s sort of hunting season on people who are obese now.”
Some companies are getting more aggressive, moving beyond incentives to penalties.
“Instead of being a carrot, this is now moving to be a stick in some circumstances,” says Helms, pointing to cases where employees who don’t share healthcare information face higher premiums.
And because diabetes and heart problems are often related to lifestyle choices, employees might feel pressured to alter habits that are arguably none of their employers’ business.
“There’s nothing inherently wrong with a wellness program,” says Lewis Maltby, president of the Princeton-based National Workrights Institute. “If employers could find a way to help us be more healthy, we all win. But the magic word is ‘help,’ and that’s the issue. Is your boss helping you do something you want to do, or forcing you to do something against your will?”
So far, wellness programs haven’t been a point of litigation, but neither Robinson nor Maltby would be surprised to see that happen.
“At this point,” Maltby says, “they’re new enough that no one knows how well they’re going to work.”
For Helms, though, the verdict is in. She’s found that company-based health initiatives “make a huge difference.”
“If you can push people to be conscious and aware of their choices,” there are significant benefits to be had, she says. “A lot of it is just changing their thought process.”